Entertainment

10 Awesome Things Built on the Facebook API

As opposed to the relatively new Digg API, the Facebook API has been available to developers since the summer. With more than 100 applications now featured in the Facebook Developers Product Directory, we decided it was time to cut through the clutter and pick out the ten that we think add the most value to the Facebook experience:

1.) Facebook Toolbar for Firefox – This application extends the Facebook experience to the browser. You receive automatic notifications of friend requests, new messages, and can check what your friends are up to in the “Facebook Friends Sidebar” feature. The toolbar also comes with the “share” link which allows you to quickly import and share any web site with your Facebook friends.

2.) rendezbook – Serving as an anonymous “MeetMe @ HotOrNot” type service, rendezbook lets you identify Facebook friends as someone you a) would like a stronger friendship with b) would like to date or c) would like to have a “random fling” with. Your preferences are anonymous, until of course the person you desire indicates the same feeling. The homepage claims more than 1,700 users so far, with a surprising 200+ matches already. I have left all boxes unchecked in this example :) :

3.) CampusRank – This site allows you to nominate people in the type of categories you might expect to find in a yearbook – Best Smile, Campus Clown, and even “Metrosexiest.” The service doesn’t appear to have a whole lot of traction yet, but perhaps they’re just waiting to show off users once they have more nominees.

4.) Friend Analyzer – This tool shows you which of your friends are most similar to you in a variety of categories. You can also see what the most popular items are in your network. It appears that I have rather feminine taste in music:

5.) College-Roomies – This service lets you search for other students looking for a roommate at your school. In addition to being able to check out the Facebook profiles of other students in search of housing, there is a cool split screen feature where you can see housing preferences (for example, cleanliness, smoking habits, etc.) that prospective roommates that they have filled out on the College-Roomies site:

6.) Your True Self– This site is built around the premise that “your friends say a lot about you.” It analyzes your friends' political views, favorite movies, music, television shows, and books to guess at things that you might like. For example, 5 of my friends like Family Guy, so Your True Self indicates that I might like it:

7.) The Friend Match – This service randomly pairs up two of your friends and allows you to rate on a 5 star scale how good of a dating match you think they make. If someone has matched you with someone else, you can see it under “My Matches.” I’m pulling a big goose egg so far.

8.) FbCal.com – The Facebook Birthday Calendar Generator creates an iCalendar (.ics) file with your friends and their birthdays that can be imported into iCal, Sunbird, and Google Calendar. For Outlook users, there is the Facebook Birthday Exporter.

9.) Facebook to Twitter – Facebook and Twitter in the same application? How have these guys not received millions in VC funding already!? :) In reality “FT” will save you maybe 37 seconds per year, as you need to point to the fbtwit.com site each time you want to automatically post your Facebook status to Twitter. Additionally, Facebook recently added the ability to update via SMS, so it's unlikely many Facebook users will care much about updating Twitter with the same status message.

10.) Votetronics – This simple voting application allows you to setup a poll that only your Facebook friends can participate in. It seems like this would be an easy and logical feature for Facebook to add to the main service, as polls and surveys are always popular on social networking sites.

Adam Ostrow is a contributor for Mashable. He is co-founder of Civixx and writes a blog at adamostrow.com.

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